


Hell, I'd Better Wind Up Below

by ShadowsLament



Series: Worship [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Daredevil (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-07
Updated: 2017-01-07
Packaged: 2018-09-15 09:47:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9229280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowsLament/pseuds/ShadowsLament
Summary: The universe wouldn't let them get too comfortable, of course not.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I couldn't help it, and so here we are again. I am perhaps too happy to be back with them.
> 
> To all of you who read part one of this series and left a kudos and or/comment, thank you! That fic got more love than I ever imagined it would. As before, fic title taken from Brandyn Burnette's "Worship" - the lyrics are consecutive.

Four hours. 

Steve had spent the last four hours with sweat drying on the crest of both shoulders, looking for indiscernible patterns in beaded and curved scars, pale white comet streaks scoring Matt’s flushed skin.

A lifetime ago, holed up in their shoebox apartment while his mother was out, working or running errands on little money and less steam, he would sit by the window during storms, stymied by forked rain paths his small fingers couldn’t follow. At some point his breath would hit the window, turn to a kind of fog. The last time it happened resulted in the same reaction as the very first: he was captivated. Too young to care about the mechanics of condensation, it was just another kind of canvas. All he knew then was the stars collected on the glass, the lines he drew to connect his own constellations.

In Matt’s bed, Steve experienced another, deeper level of captivation. One that allowed his lips to linger on Matt’s back, his tongue to soothe long-healed scrapes and lashes, marks left by knives and bullets and whatever other weapon had been convenient. Only, in that room, Steve was old enough to realize it wasn’t his business to know the details, not until Matt decided otherwise, and so he swallowed the questions he’d been carrying around for weeks.

He left a kiss between Matt’s shoulder blades and pulled back. “Foggy out with Gabe again?”

“Third time this week.” Matt pushed up on an elbow, shed the sheet covering his legs and toed off the socks he hadn’t bothered with earlier. His hands had been too busy making time between Steve’s hair and his shirt, the button on Steve’s jeans and the zipper Matt broke before they’d moved from the front door to the couch. “Josie’s thanked me twice already for leaving my cane in the studio for Gabe to return. She seems to think I did it on purpose.”

“We could go,” Steve offered, “join them.”

“You could have said that before I took off my socks.” Matt leaned in for a kiss. “Later, maybe.”

“Third round?”

“Or fourth,” Matt murmured, his smile contained like wrapped knuckles, “or fifth.”

Steve probably couldn’t have blinked in the time it took Matt to straddle his thighs. “Are we still talking about drinks?”

“When were we talking about drinks?”

The question took the wrapping off the knuckles in favor of brass. Steve felt Matt’s smile in his gut, reached up to thumb the full curve. Teeth grazed his nail, the skin rounding the tip. Steve had never questioned the insistence of the tide, leaning over the boardwalk railing on Coney Island: The moon and Matt were inevitable forces. Steve had that much in common with the ocean; he was left with little choice but to react, to be inexorably drawn to Matt. “We aren’t now.”

“That,” Matt sat back on Steve’s lap, “was your deep thoughts voice.”

“I have a--Okay, I’ll bite. What do deep thoughts sound like?”

“Honestly? Confusing,” Matt said. “Do I reach for a condom or composition notebook? I’m never sure.”

“Condoms are optional,” Steve said, both hands ascending the firm line of Matt’s thighs. “That’s always been up to you.”

“I know.” And that was Matt’s day-in-court voice. It matched the angle of his head, tipped in anticipation of the answer to whatever question he was about to ask. “Did you want to go? I know it probably seems deliberate, that it’s been weeks already and I haven’t introduced you to Foggy. Or Karen. But--”

“Matt, it’s not--You know I don’t mind.”

Matt took Steve’s right hand and pressed his palm over a thick scar, one of the more recent additions to Matt’s chest. “I do, they should meet you,” he said. “But it’s habit, right, keeping things that I--that matter to me to myself.” Matt shrugged, tracing the outline of Steve’s splayed fingers like a kid with a crayon and paper placemat. “You not only fit that bill, you define it.”

“Hard to argue with that.” Steve shifted his hand up to Matt’s nape, the rhythm of his sweeping thumb set by the pulse beneath it. “However long you want this to be just you and me, here or on some rooftop, I can get behind it.”

“Even moreso if there’s food.” A smirk. “Cannoli, maybe?”

“About that,” Steve had taken off before Sam had even begun to detach from the wings, a change of clothes in a duffel he’d stashed in the hangar, positive he was going to turn up at Matt’s late, “I’m starving.”

Matt laughed. “Last time I checked there wasn’t a pack of wolves living in my apartment, so, yeah, I can hear that.” He stood and, leaving his clothes on the floor, moved through what passed as the living room into the kitchen. Steve heard the refrigerator door open, the chime of suddenly jarred glass, and then, “I’ve got nothing but the seven jars of relish Foggy insisted I had to have for the sausage he swore he was going to make. From scratch.” Matt returned with Steve’s jeans hooked on a crooked finger. “Looks like we’re going out after all.”

Steve retrieved his boxer briefs from beneath the bed, pulled on the jeans. “What are you in the mood for?”

“Pizza?” Matt tugged Steve close and ignored the mangled zipper to take care of the button. “Pancakes?”

“Basically, if it’s round and flat, you’re good.”

“A simple man with simple tastes,” Matt said, his voice muffled by the hooded sweatshirt halfway over his head, “sums me up.”

Steve watched as a key and debit card got shoved into a shallow pocket and didn’t mention the four stitches behind the hinge of Matt’s jaw. Didn’t admit that he wouldn’t know how to touch simple, how to hold it. How to keep it in his life for a day or a week, for the endless hours he wanted to spend with Matt. Steve put aside whatever it was--instinct or hunch--that insisted Matt was something else, something more, every time he let a limp go without comment. When, after overhearing Matt in the shower going through his argument on behalf of a client who couldn’t afford an attorney, Steve didn’t kiss him until all that was left of the oxygen in the room was shared between their mouths.

“Steve?” Matt asked, “Everything all right?”

He walked over and adjusted the hood, brushed back the hair from Matt’s forehead. “Pancakes sounds perfect.”

“The diner it is, but I happen to know that they strictly enforce their no shirt, no shoes policy,” Matt said. “Try under one of the chairs.”

Snagging his right boot from a corner in the bedroom, Steve found his shirt almost knotted around the leg of the chair. The state of his hair owed nothing to the winter static clinging to the waffled cotton; that was all Matt, whose fingers turned demands into abstract art. “Soon as I find my other boot--”

“Kitchen.”

“Really?” Steve looked. It was there, the widely curved toe propped up against the cabinet beneath the sink. The undone laces had somehow wound around the metal pull. “We were never even in here.”

“Don’t ask me.” Matt leaned against a wall, waiting. “I didn’t see a thing.”

Steve shrugged into his jacket. “I take back what I said the other day. That’s the worst one so far.”

“Yes, it is,” Matt easily agreed, “which is how you know I got it from Foggy.”

Matt shut the door and turned the knob, pushed, testing the lock. Habitual motions--Steve knew Matt had an entire set of them, each one constructed with more care than the last and used precisely. But the door, that was handled quietly and quickly, and Steve could imagine the kind of caution a father living in Hell’s Kitchen would instill as ritual in his son. It probably wasn’t that far off from a mother trying to raise a small and sick kid during the Depression.

“You’re quiet tonight,” Matt said, sweeping his cane out along the sidewalk.

One sticky summer, back when Bucky became his shadow two steps down on the fire escape, Steve used scavenged rope to make stopper knots. It never seemed to matter how much time he spent on it, how many attempts he made: The knots always came loose, came undone. _Pull tight and hold_ , Bucky had advised, _you gotta hold on a bit if you want to make it stick_. 

Steve fit his palm to Matt’s, joined their fingers. He didn’t intend to let go. “I can’t trip over my tongue that way.”

Shifting closer, turning slightly to give a young mother carrying her sleeping daughter enough room to pass, Matt frowned. “If there’s something you want to say--”

“Nothing like that,” Steve said, quickly, to deflect the bullet Matt anticipated. “I was thinking about when I was a kid. Our quiet apartment, with all these stretched out hours on my hands.” He’d spent so many of them in bed beneath layers of blankets, and still he’d rubbed matchstick arms to light a fire beneath his skin. “It sucked when I was seven, but now--I don’t want to go, when you need to get to work, or I do, when it feels like I only just knocked on your door.”

Matt’s hand tightened on his. Steve was almost positive Matt wasn’t aware of it, the way his fingers dug for bone. 

“The number of times I’ve almost said fuck it and stayed,” Matt smiled, “it’s probably for the best I’m essentially self-employed, or I would have been fired the week we met.”

Two yards ahead, the diner door stood open for a laundry line of business casual, crop tops beneath puffer jackets, and scrubs. The scent slipping out wasn’t subtle: maple syrup, stuck mid-drip on the side of the bottle; bacon frying in formation on a grease-splattered griddle; coffee, whatever was left at the bottom of a pot. The combination sharpened his hunger for the reach of Matt's arm across the table, the mountain of whipped cream on Steve's pancakes becoming a hill, a layer of snow on flat ground, after Matt withdrew with the stuff heaped on his fingertips. They would both order coffee and Matt would drink from Steve's mug. The second time it had happened, Steve caught the waitress looking at them with a particular glint and realized his own smile in that moment was goofy, fond to the point of rupture.

If he didn't get ahead of it, his tongue _was_ going to trip and everything he felt for Matt would spill out to fall at Matt's feet.

“Well, now that I know that,” Steve said, focused on a suddenly snarling German Shepherd, teeth bared at a patch of empty sky across the street, “we should definitely--” Matt stumbled to a stop and swayed, dragging on Steve’s hand. “What--Matt?”

Matt’s free hand shook, lifted to his ear. Tapped the tragus and pulled the lobe, his palm a suction cup repeatedly returning to and pulling away from the shell. He inhaled like a wick trying to hold a flame, sparking, guttering. The streetlight made a bright sheen of the sweat on Matt’s forehead, the collection at his temple that slicked his hair. 

“Matt, talk to me.” Steve steadied him at the shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“S-sound--” Matt flinched, and when he said, “Too loud,” it was a thin whisper. “Too much... _Steve_.”

Steve added the extra layer of his palms over Matt’s pressed against his ears. He followed the chain of buildings beyond the diner, searching roof to foundation. Several windows were cracked to let winter-kissed air in; a few doors stood ajar, held in place by broken bricks, a battered guitar case wedged beneath one handle. Bundled in coats and scarves, people walked alone and in groups on both sides of the street, unaffected, while the dog whimpered, its belly scraping the sidewalk as it shuddered. 

He heard sirens, but in the distance, muted, and music from a car idling at the curb a couple of feet behind them. Laughter. 

“All right,” Steve quietly said, when Matt began to shiver, when his teeth clicked and his jaw clenched, “the hospital is probably out--” Matt nodded and winced and, tremors gripping him harder, braced his forehead against Steve’s shoulder. “So we’ll go home. For now. Can you walk?”

“Yeah,” Matt breathed. “Maybe.”

Stripping off his jacket, Steve flung it out like an abbreviated cape behind Matt. He brought the sherpa-lined sleeves up to cover Matt’s ears, tying them close and tight. “You need something else, tell me,” he kept his voice low, drew Matt in against his side, “squeeze my hand, pinch my leg if that works better than talking. I’ll figure it out.”

The walk back was halting, graceless, with Matt half-bent over, his cane folded and shoved in Steve’s back pocket, more of a liability than an aid. Steve meant to move forward in silence. He tried to contain the litany to his thoughts, but after another block was put away, he heard himself whispering, “I’ve got you. We’re almost there. I’ve got you.”

Which one of them Steve was reassuring didn’t really matter: for himself, it wasn’t enough. He had to see an injury to be able to assess it, to tend it. There was the sliver of blood slipping the cradle of Matt’s ears, but the only other thing Steve could find was the residue of drying sweat on his skin. The beat of a trapped bird’s wings where his pulse should be. Steve had people, experts in various fields he could call. The problem would then consist of knowing what questions to ask, would be having to provide clarifying information rather than demand, _It’s fucking hurting him, how do I make it stop?_ And he didn’t know if Matt would even allow it. 

With exhaustion settling into the fine lines around his eyes, Matt came to an unsteady stop at the base of the steps leading up to his building. “It’s...fading, but there’s...this echo, this...and I think...I might--”

Steve caught Matt beneath the knees when his legs gave out, swung him up in both arms, and took the steps two at a time until the locked apartment door blocked the way. Matt’s eyes were closed, his breathing still a wheeze working up from his chest. Adjusting his hold, Steve got the key out of Matt’s pocket with seconds to spare before he gave in and broke down the door. 

“Odds are you wouldn’t thank me for that.” He watched Matt’s face for a flicker, a blink, anything, as he lengthened his strides to shorten the hallway. Matt didn’t move as Steve untied the jacket and put him on the bed, arranging a pillow beneath his head. He didn’t shift closer when Steve sat beside him, or sigh like he tended to whenever Steve fit a palm to the curve of his jaw. “Matt? Come on, sweetheart, talk to me.”

The apartment was darker, colder, for the answering silence.

Running a hand through his hair, Steve stood. In the bathroom, he ran a washcloth under the tap, and with water dripping from his wrists, brought it back to the bed. The blood wiped away easily enough before the cloth cooled and Steve tossed it away. He took off Matt’s shoes, then his boots, and stretched out on his side next to Matt. Another hour or two, Steve could give Matt at least that long to come back to himself before he got anyone else involved.

Until then, he’d watch the hand he rested on Matt’s chest rise and fall, the pattern of their quiet breathing in sync and familiar.


End file.
